Median waiting times for Canberrans to get surgery at the ACT's two public hospitals have blown out to levels not seen since 2011-12, despite a multi-million dollar blitz on elective surgeries in the months before the Territory election.
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ACT Health on Wednesday released long-awaited quarterly performance reports on the Territory's health system – with reports for both the final two quarters of the 2015-16 fiscal year released on the same day.
An $11.8 million "blitz" on elective surgery in the months leading up to the October helped cut the elective surgery waiting list by 18 per cent overall and reduced the number of patients waiting longer than clinically recommended time frames from 1461 in 2014-15 to 403 in 2015-16.
But the report also showed the proportion of patients who received elective surgery within the recommended timeframes fell about 10 per cent across all three categories of urgency.
"The short-term elective surgery blitz announced in November 2015 has impacted the performance for elective surgery timeliness," the report reads.
The latest quarterly performance report, which summarises the 2015-16 year, also showed the median wait time for all surgeries in the ACT was almost double the 35 day national median wait time, at 62 days for 2015-16 – almost reaching levels not seen since the median wait time was 64 days in 2011-12.
It also showed some Canberrans have been waiting more than a year for surgery.
Under measures showing how long it took 90 per cent of all ACT patients to get surgery, waiting times jumped from 260 days in 2014-15 to 379 days last fiscal year – a figure closer to the 391 days patients had to wait to be treated in 2010-11 on the same measure.
The blow out in waiting times was partly due to a 15 per cent jump in demand for emergency surgery across both Canberra's public hospitals in the past year, out of an 11 per cent rise in all surgeries performed, up from 19,441 in 2014-15 to 21,565 in 2015-16.
In other areas, the report showed some improvements – with a 3 per cent rise in emergency department presentations being seen within four hours – up from 63 per cent in 2014-15 to 66 pert cent in 2015-16.
But the system continues to struggle to meet demand, with the number of public hospital overnight bed days rising from 290,621 in 2014-15 to 302,602 in 2015-16.
An extra 39,000-odd people also turned up to emergency departments, treated as "non-admitted outpatients", a 7 per cent rise to 602,276 in 2015-16, up from 563,221 the previous year.
While those people were not admitted, actual admissions through Canberra's two EDs also rose some 12 per cent during 2015-16 to 39,868, up from 35,583 in 2014-15.
